Film scholar Janet Staiger has argued that those pursuing a text-based theory of cult status typically ‘try to find some essential features within all cult texts that would explain these viewing behaviours. In other words, the texts make the viewer into a cult viewer (a “power” hypothesis)’ (2005: 125). For Staiger, the acid test of any such theory is that it should be able to explain why some viewers become cultists when they see a movie, whilst others remain indifferent (2005: 126). She alleges that major contenders, for example, Umberto Eco (1995, originally 1984) and Barry Keith Grant (1991 and 2000), fail such a test. In this chapter, I will explore text-based accounts of the Blade Runner cult, focusing particularly on Eco’s work but also taking in rival explanations. I will consider a way of responding to Staiger’s philosophical objection (‘the variant responses’ problem) since, as I’ve noted previously, this has a bearing not only on general questions of cult text/audience interactions, but also relates to my own personal experience of Blade Runner where I failed to embrace the cult text at one moment, yet discovered its cultic appeal at a later date.
There has been no shortage of explanations for the Blade Runner cult. I will focus on two accounts here; the next section will tackle ‘metacult’ (Blade Runner as a postmodern artifact made up of different, clashing genre codes and therefore inciting audience activity), and I will then move on to consider ‘design cult’ issues (Blade Runner as a hyperdetailist movie creating a dense narrative world which incites audience activity). Nick Lacey and Sean Redmond both briefly tackle the question of cult status in their guides to the movie, touching on these explanatory modes:
‘Why should Blade Runner have attracted a cult audience?’ is a difficult question to answer. It is probably related to the spectacularly convincing world Scott and his designers have created. Like J. R. R. Tolkien’s books … the diegesis is so convincing that it reads like a place you could visit and thereby has a great presence for the audience. (Lacey 2000: 80)
what has made Blade Runner such a cult science fiction favourite? … First, the film’s visual detail and ambiguous plot demand … repeat viewing … Second … the visual excess and narrative complexity … speak to people about the nature of their everyday lives … It is as if, when people peer at the (under)belly of the future society depicted in Blade Runner, they see fragments of themselves looking back … Third, the well-documented production history of the film contributes to giving [it] … a certain ‘aura’ or badge of artistic authenticity. (Redmond 2003: 32)
Redmond’s third explanation shades into extra-textual matters, and I will explore issues of ‘authenticity’ and audience reception in the next chapter, particularly tackling the issue of Blade Runner’s poor box-office performance in 1982 and how fans and critics narrate this as evidence of protocult identity. Whereas text-based accounts of cultdom generally seek strategies for separating out ‘cult’ from its relational Others (‘cult’ versus a composite of ‘non-cult’ textual identities), audience-based accounts drawing on theories of ‘distinction’ (see Jancovich 2002) work slightly differently, also involving binaries of ‘authentic’ cult versus ‘inauthentic’, industrially-co-opted cult film. Audience-based definitions of cult tend to split cult into what might be termed ‘real’ and ‘replicant’ incarnations, and I will explore this in chapter 3.
Sticking for now to the binary of cult versus non-cult texts, another text-based explanation for Blade Runner’s cult status is put forward by screenwriting guru Robert McKee in Story:
Marketing positioned the audience to empathise with Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, but once in the theatre, filmgoers were drawn to the greater dimensionality of the replicant Roy Batty … As the Centre of Good shifted to the antagonist, the audience’s emotional confusion diminished its enthusiasm, and what should have been a huge success became a cult film. (1999: 379)
Making no mention of Blade Runner’s alleged ‘postmodern’ status, nor its hyper-designed narrative world, McKee focuses purely on matters of audience identification. In his argument, the ‘huge success’ marking out non-cult texts hinges on straightforward processes of empathy whereby clearly identifiable protagonists hold audiences’ attention and concern. Discursively linking ‘cult’ to mainstream box-office failure, McKee nevertheless presents a text-based account. Blade Runner, we are told, confused audiences seeking emotional clarity and a fit with advance marketing. Although McKee’s sense that Batty becomes the most important character in the film resonates with my personal response as a sixth-former in the late 1980s, his textual analysis falls prey to the basic logical problem expounded by Staiger – what of variant responses? Per Schelde, in a study of SF androids, directly counters McKee:
for me, Roy is not even the emotional centre of the movie. That centre is occupied by Rachel, the android who does not know she is one. She’s the one who has to grapple with the problems of self and identity … She’s the one who has to learn, on her own, that … she can love and be loved. Rachel, with the soulful brown eyes, has to learn to love and trust Deckard with the cold, blue ones. (1993: 237)
Schelde’s reading repositions the film not as a source of emotional confusion, but as a highly conventionalised love story. And as film critic Robin Wood puts it, the film ‘succumbs to one of [classic narrative’s] … most firmly traditional and ideologically reactionary formulas: the elimination of the bad couple (Roy, Pris) in order to construct the good couple (Deckard, Rachael)’ (1986: 188), a textual structure which one might hardly view as emotionally confusing for McKee’s imagined audiences. The cult/non-cult binary erected by McKee therefore starts to look a little shaky, or rather confused itself. When trying to tell the (cult) difference we need an approach to cult status which can tolerate, or even explain, varied audience readings. As a step towards this, in the following section I will reread Umberto Eco’s influential work on cult movies, work which is used to account for the Blade Runner cult in J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Midnight Movies. As they succinctly put it: ‘The Eco Paradigm is a useful one’ (1991: 327).
‘THE ECO PARADIGM’: BLATANT RICKETINESS
In ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’, Eco sketches out a theory of cult textuality that stresses a number of textual attributes. A cult movie ‘must display certain textual features, in the sense that, outside the conscious control of its creators, it becomes a sort of textual syllabus, a living example of living textuality’ (1995: 199). This textual animism occurs when a film like Casablanca is so derivative that ‘it is not one movie. It is “movies”’ (1995: 208; emphasis in original), being thoroughly permeated by intertextual frames or ‘stereotyped situations derived from preceding textual tradition’ (1995: 200). For Eco, cult status arises out of this multiplication of cliché: ‘Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we dimly sense that the clichés are talking among themselves’ (1995: 209). This multiplicity-within-singularity generates a further textual outcome:
I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it, so that one can remember only parts of it … A movie … must be already ramshackle, rickety, unhinged in itself … only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness. (1995: 198)
Eco veers away from an audience-based model, making ‘unhinged in itself’ a textual property rather than an audience practice of textual unhinging akin to Henry Jenkins’ model of ‘textual poaching’ (see 1992).
Like Casablanca, allegedly ‘being made up at the same time that it was being shot’ (Eco 1995: 201), Blade Runner was also a highly troubled production, something which may have contributed to a degree of ‘ricketiness’. The movie’s funding was in doubt at one point, with producer Michael Deeley having two weeks to raise $20 million after the company Filmways pulled its backing (see Deeley with Field 2008: 217). As a result of this fundraising, Tandem Productions – Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin – gained ownership of the film’s negative. And due to cost overruns, Perenchio and Yorkin (who had put up the film’s completion bond) took over the picture, technically firing Ridley Scott from the project on 11 July 1981 (according to Deeley with Field 2008: 247). Scott, of course, worked on as director since nobody else would have been able to meaningfully take over the filming at such short notice, but Blade Runner’s ownership had swung into the hands of Perenchio and Yorkin, or ‘the Blade Runner Partnership’ as these copyright owners would become known.
While ruling audiences out of his theoretical framework, Umberto Eco retains a focus on filmmakers’ practices, distinguishing between ‘unconscious’ or accidental cult texts, and ‘postmodern’ or deliberately constructed cults:
What Casablanca does unconsciously, other movies will do with extreme intertextual awareness … These are ‘postmodern’ movies, where the quotation of the topos is recognised as the only way to cope with the burden of our filmic encyclopedic expertise … in this case we witness an instance of metacult, or of cult about cult – a Cult Culture. It would be semiotically uninteresting to look for quotations of archetypes in … Indiana Jones: They were conceived within a metasemiotic culture, and what the semiotician can find in them is exactly what the director … put there. (1995: 209–10)
As Jenkins notes, ‘Eco is suspicious of cult movies by design. In the age of postmodernism, [he] … suggests, no film can be experienced with fresh eyes; all are read against other movies’ (2006: 98). Though I have explored some of the problems inherent in Eco’s approach elsewhere (see Hills 2002), his valorisation of Casablanca over the late 1970s and early 1980s films of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas raises more than just a question of generational taste. For there is the matter of how ‘accidental’ and ‘metacult’ cult movies can be separated out. Hoberman and Rosenbaum fit Blade Runner neatly into Eco’s category of ‘unhinged’ or flawed films which are marked by ‘the movies’ via monumental intertextuality. This suggests that they are aligning Blade Runner with Eco’s take on Casablanca rather than with devalued ‘metacult’:
Blade Runner is another example of a flawed movie that encompasses all movies – it’s a mishmash of film noir, Spielberg/Lucas, Babylonian set design, even outtakes from The Shining. It’s certainly not an auteur film … and it has since emerged as the academic cult movie par excellence. (1991: 327)
Chronologically, however, Blade Runner would seem to fit more directly into Eco’s suspect ‘metacult’ category. It was, after all, the film Harrison Ford made directly after Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which Eco lambasts as an instance of self-conscious cult culture, referring to
the quotation of the … duel between the black Arab giant with his scimitar and the unprotected hero, in Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you remember, the topos suddenly turns into another one, and the unprotected hero becomes in a second The Fastest Gun in the West. Here the … viewer can miss the quotation though his enjoyment will then be rather slight; and real enjoyment is reserved for the people accustomed to cult movies. (1995: 209–10)
The puzzle of Blade Runner is thus that it appears to cut across Umberto Eco’s categories of cult textuality, encompassing ‘the movies’ in a way that appears to transcend deliberate authorial placing of intertextual references, just like Casablanca, yet simultaneously appearing at the very moment in film history where Eco sees ‘unconscious’ cult as giving way to Spielberg/Lucas ‘metacult’. And, of course, as the ‘academic cult movie par excellence’, it has repeatedly been claimed as a veritable poster-boy for theories of the postmodern (see chapter 4). Though Hoberman and Rosenbaum neglect to mention the film’s scholarly contextualisation as postmodern exemplar, other writers have claimed that a ‘certain postmodern attitude reaches its populist zenith in … Blade Runner (1982) … structured entirely by its intertexts’ (Cranny-Francis 1990: 226).
Rather than merely slotting into Eco’s text-based argument, then, what Blade Runner achieves is a deconstruction of the unconscious/metacult binary. It is a ‘both-and’ cult movie rather than replicating Eco’s ‘either-or’ stance; both ‘the movies’ and an example of knowing play with ‘intertextual frames’; a first-wave postmodern cult harking back to more ‘innocent’ times. As such, it is unsurprising that Blade Runner appears in Bruce Isaacs’ recent rereading of Eco’s cult theory:
Eco underestimates the pervasiveness of intertextuality in popular film. I would argue that stylistic quotation is often no less intended nor less explicit than Eco’s notion of a literal ‘play on intertextuality’. One could consider Scott’s Blade Runner as a stylistic cinematic quotation from beginning to end, visually and aurally recuperating film noir, cyberpunk, and European existentialism. The stylistic quotation becomes literal, for example, in the use of the Millennium Falcon … (of Star Wars) in several … shots of Blade Runner. (2008: 111)
Isaacs argues that Eco’s separation of knowing, spot-the-reference intertextuality (metacult) and ‘stylistic quotation’ akin to Casablanca’s adoption of intertextual frames specifically falls down because supposedly ‘unconscious’ cults might actually be ‘no less intended or explicit’ in their intertextualities. In Isaacs’ deconstructive account, Blade Runner is one long quotation of different genres and philosophies, knowingly playing intertextual games with its audience, but at one and the same time also resembling the ‘stylistic quotation’ linked to Casablanca.
Due to its cultic ‘ricketiness’ and collision of ‘intertextual frames’, Blade Runner has been analysed not just as a generic hybrid but as an unstable mixing of genres that ‘hints at … the confusion at the core of identity formation in the film’ (Redmond 2003: 11). Deckard is described as ‘part jaded cop, loner, rebel, replicant, human, lover and rapist; … this type of character fracture best exists in a world that is not boundaried or fixed’ (ibid.). Such overcoding strongly resembles Eco’s description of Casablanca’s shifting or blank character psychologies (1995: 201), where different textual analysts tend to see ‘something that the others have missed, and many … start to find in the movie even memories of movies made after[wards] … evidently the normal situation for a cult movie’ (1995: 202). Despite this observation, Eco seems to rule out audience study in his approach, setting it to one side as ‘not enough’ to delimit cult status (1995: 198). It nevertheless returns in the guise of analysts’ differential readings, and in the sense of seeking to build up a never-quite-complete encyclopedia of intertextual references (just as Blade Runner fans have done; see Rushing & Frentz 1995: 143).
Such differential readings – spotting things missed by others – are the sine qua non of Blade Runner’s place in fandom and academic criticism. Where some guidebooks have interpreted it as a combination of science fiction and film noir (see Lacey 2000: 63–6), others have added ‘Blade Runner as Police-Detective Story’ to these two generic frames (Redmond 2003: 7, 9 and 10), and still others have stressed its operation as a hybrid of ‘hard-boiled private detective film, the horror film, and the science fiction film’ (Heldreth 1997a: 41). An indebtedness to horror is sometimes absent, sometimes stressed.
Some might take this as evidence that genre is not ‘in’ the text: ‘Genres … do not emerge from their assumed central site of origin, the text, but rather are formed by the cultural practices of generic discourses’ (Mittell 2004: 15), acting via a kind of ‘generic function’ (ibid.) akin to post-structuralist Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘author-function’ (1979: 21). In such an argument, discourses of genre circulate culturally around a text as critics and fans categorise it, thereby bidding for that text’s enhanced cultural value, or potentially denigrating it as lowbrow (Mittell 2004: 15). Foucault’s ‘author-function’ concept works similarly, arguing that discourses of authorship form part of ‘our way of handling texts’ and categorising them (1979: 21). ‘Cult’ might itself be thought of as a type of discursive function, although given that it transcends standard genre labels – cult horror, cult science fiction, cult comedy and so on are all viable categorisations – it may be a higher-level ‘text-function’ rather than a ‘generic function’ (Hills 2010). However, taking Blade Runner’s critical reception as evidence of a ‘generic function’ purely outside the text, and circulating through reception contexts, neglects the textual ‘repertoire of stock formulas … used wholesale … the result … an architecture like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia: the same vertigo, the same stroke of genius’ (Eco 1995: 202).
Though a ‘generic function’ may enable different fans and analysts to reposition the text, all are nonetheless negotiating with textual features of the film(s). Leonard Heldreth argues that Blade Runner is able to draw horror and detective genres together, whilst science fiction adds an element of confusion, unlike the two-way (SF/horror) synthesis of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) (see 1997a: 45). The common thread linking the horror and detective film is arguably the ‘idea of the double or doppelgänger … common in the two genres discussed … and provid[ing] an underlying structure’ (Heldreth 1997a: 47).
This doubling of human and replicant has been widely debated, with Steven Jay Schneider including Blade Runner’s replicants in his ‘family tree of doubles’ within the horror genre (2001: 54–5), and Joseph Francavilla arguing that
replicants in Blade Runner exhibit many of the same qualities that earlier doubles in literature have … and represent the return of the repressed in man, or ‘the uncanny’. They are uncanny also by virtue of the intellectual uncertainty they create about whether they are alive or dead, animate or inanimate, human or nonhuman. (1997: 14)
And yet although replicants menace Deckard, this is not by virtue of any doppelgänger likeness or implied threat of identity displacement (there isn’t a Harrison Ford duplicate). Instead, threats to the blade runner are resolutely physical, rooted in noirish/detective intertexts rather than the horror genre: Pris attempts to throttle him, Leon throws him around. Nor are the filmic replicants shown to double any human characters’ likenesses, in a strong move away from Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which Pris and Rachael are the same replicant model, and also unlike the Jeter novels which repeatedly play with the notion of human ‘templants’ and multiple replicant copies. Though Ridley Scott claims it ‘would have been confusing and not worked dramatically to have had Rachael and Pris played by the same actress’ (in Peary 2005: 52), this would in fact have evoked a much stronger uncanniness than is actually present in the film, contra Francavilla. It would also have created a dramatic dilemma for Deckard, forcing him to ‘retire’ an image of his love. Refusing to directly show replicant characters as conventionally uncanny doubles, or mass-produced duplicates, means that they are significantly individualised and brought closer to connotative humanity. And though it could be argued that uncanniness remains present in the film(s), especially via J. F. Sebastian’s (William Sanderson) ‘toys’ or life-like automata, it is still the case that Ridley Scott’s replicants are far more individualised than Philip K. Dick’s and K. W. Jeter’s. This is somewhat ironic given the coinage of the term ‘replicant’, since unlike Dick’s ‘andys’, replicant characters are not significantly depicted as replications. Instead, they are textually disarticulated from uncanny doubling so that they can function as more typical Hollywood character constructions, for example, the tragically sacrificed or cathartically redeemed individual.
Pris as an individualised replicant: horrifying threat or sympathetic victim?
This creative decision moves Blade Runner away from ‘straight horror’ in Carolyn Picart’s phrase (2003: 4), where the monstrous can be clearly identified. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel) can certainly be interpreted as a Frankensteinian figure, against whom Roy Batty seeks revenge, but the status of Batty as either a victim of over-reaching science and capital, or a psychotic, murdering threat, is less clear. As Robin Wood points out:
the … murder of J. F. Sebastian … seems completely arbitrary and unmotivated, put in simply to discredit the replicants so that they cannot be mistaken for the film’s true heroes. The problem is rooted in the entire tradition of the Gothic, of horror literature and horror film: the problem of the positive monster, who, insofar as he becomes positive, ceases to be monstrous, hence no longer frightening. (1986: 187)
Though we may empathise with Batty by the time of his death scene, this act works to suspend our sympathies, suggesting that the character’s narrative role fluctuates between lunatic killer and tragic figure:
What … Ridley Scott suggests is a circumstance in which … the double as a monster might … be reversed, so that it is the original in the world of copies – man himself – who begins to assume an equally aberrant, life-denying aspect. One consequence of this ambivalent vision of man – and a measure of just how far we have come since Frankenstein’s simple, melodramatic working out of this conflict – is that our sympathies find no sure anchor here. (Telotte 1990: 155)
As such, Blade Runner’s ricketiness brings it close to Barry Keith Grant’s dictum that cult films share a textual quality of encouraging ‘viewers not to take very seriously the threat of the Other’ (1991: 135; 2000: 27). Whereas reactionary horror has traditionally been based on narratively destroying monstrous Others, and progressive variants tend to depict monsters more sympathetically (see Wood 1986), Grant argues that cult texts – whether indebted to the horror genre or not – represent Otherness whilst simultaneously downplaying its threat. This articulates cult with textual transgression (see also Redmond 2008: 78), but however useful this text-based theory may seem, it is undermined by the ‘variant responses problem’ given that readers such as Francavilla and Schneider interpret replicants precisely as monstrous Others.
‘The Eco Paradigm’, as I have suggested, actually incorporates different audience responses into its text-based model. Since cult texts are viewed as objectively ‘unhinged’ and monumentally intertextual, it is only to be expected that audiences may track down different generic strands of meaning, or trace different tensions between generic intertexts. Audiences possessing specific generic competencies – versed in different genre discourses – may embrace cult fandom’s games of reference-spotting, whilst others will be left indifferent, if not ‘confused’ as McKee would put it. And the exact same audience member may, at one moment in their biography, find Blade Runner’s collision of genre discourses incomprehensible, only subsequently coming to appreciate its hybridisations of noir, SF, horror, romance and so on. As John Fiske has suggested, the extent to which we embrace pop-cultural texts can be linked to whether or not there is an ‘interdiscourse’ between those discourses we draw on to construct our sense of self, and those discourses discernable in a text (see 1990: 85). However, this is not the same thing as ‘neutrosemy’ (Sandvoss 2005), since it does not imply that texts are read so as to mirror or enclose self-identity, only that some degree of congruence between aspects of textual discourse and aspects of discursive self-identity – both of which can be fissured and contradictory (see Hills 2007b) – leads to texts being experienced as affectively, personally relevant.
Eco’s work is therefore useful because it can be read as facilitating a model of cult texts as transdiscursive and intertextually encyclopedic, open to multiple readings and genrifications. As I have argued elsewhere, cult films often ‘work … highly self-reflexively … [by] incorporat[ing] discourses … surrounding the cultural value of cinematic genres’ (2008: 445). Along with generic discourses, cult films frequently also address ‘questions of identity in a “philosophical” or existential register’ (2008: 444), thereby bidding for audience recognition as culturally valued artifacts (Hills 2005a). Even Casablanca deals with the possibility that love can be meaningful in terms of letting go of the Other. And Blade Runner, of course, infamously ponders the status of its individualised replicants.
Alternatively, cult movies may engage with questions of cultural value and genre by transgressing norms of good taste and the ‘well-made’ film. Whether ‘trash’ cult (see Sconce 1995) or ‘puzzle’ cult (see Klinger 2006), discourses of genre are typically brought together with self-reflexive discourses of cultural value, including questions of authorship. This is a dimension which Eco thoroughly neglects (see Gaut 1997: 165; Hills 2002), and I shall move on to consider it next. Despite Hoberman and Rosenbaum’s Eco-style conclusion that Blade Runner is ‘certainly not an auteur film’, how have discourses of design contributed to its cultification?
AUTEURIST DESIGN AND DETAIL: BUILDING ‘REALITY’
As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Blade Runner’s cult status has often been explained by reference to the ‘spectacularly convincing world Scott and his designers … created’ (Lacey 2000: 80), and the immense ‘visual detail’ onscreen (Redmond 2003: 32). Although I will draw on extratextual material here, this is in the service of thinking through the significance of Blade Runner’s much-vaunted ‘hyperdetailist’ mise-en-scène (Sammon 1993: 33). I will argue that the Blade Runner cult has been produced as much through filmic design as textual philosophising, making ‘high-end design’ discourses another key part of Blade Runner’s (inter) textual bid to cultishly and self-reflexively engage with the cultural value of genre cinema.
Director Ridley Scott has played down any sense that Blade Runner should be treated with reverence, stating, ‘I make films to entertain … this film does not have any deep messages’ (in Peary 2005: 55). Regardless of such disclaimers, Scott does stress a degree of seriousness when he discusses the rationale behind Blade Runner’s design decisions:
because I knew I was touching ‘near future’, the logical thing to do was try to find a good industrial designer, who was probably working on projections already anyway … I bought a book called Sentinel, which was Syd Mead’s book and which was really very interesting because it had very exotic projections about vehicles and industrial design – done for everybody from General Motors to washing machine companies to computer manufacturers. What I especially liked was the fact that Syd Mead’s future seemed to be well grounded in logic, and that’s what I wanted for Blade Runner. (In Shay 2000: 7; emphasis in original)
The SF world partly created by ‘Visual Futurist’ Syd Mead thus involved a professional ‘industrial design approach’, with vehicles such as cars and Spinners designed ‘as if they would be normal vehicles – consumer items – so you’d start off with a very logical, real-looking piece of machinery. Then … we gradually degraded the original design by overlaying bits of equipment and things to roughen up the texture’ (Mead in Shay 2000: 8). The Blade Runner ‘look’ might include neon shimmering in rain, but it is also built around a design logic. Cultural verisimilitude structures what we see in the diegesis – that is, Blade Runner’s invented technologies are meant to resemble ‘consumer items’ projected as realistically as possible into the future (see Britton & Barker 2003: 18). The Blade Runner Sketchbook, an official collection of production design sketches published in 1982, even hysterically extends this notion of projective realism to the fonts used in the movie’s diegetic graphic design:
Filmgoers, swept up in the story and imagery of BLADE RUNNER, are not likely to notice the graphics created especially for the film. These graphics reflect the state of the art in modern design, and what should filter into common use in the next forty years. (Scroggy 1982: 93)
Blade Runner’s cult status as a textual object that repays fannish close reading and immersion is enabled by its ‘creation of detailed culture’ which John Pierce views as the prerogative of ‘more sophisticated science fiction’ – the film’s production team having shared a ‘synergistic … awareness’ of design parameters (1997: 209; emphasis in original). The visual texture of LA 2019 has also been likened to literary SF’s world-creation: ‘the effects that Scott creates by building sets and letting us have mere glimpses of them are at least as elegant and cunning as any instance of the science fiction writer’s descriptive art’ (Robert Silverberg in Landon 1997: 99). Blade Runner’s design work does not just code the diegetic world as real-seeming. Its hyperdetail also textually incites a desire to see more – to identify the mass of design objects jumbled within the frame; to catalogue and comprehend special effects sequences. The ‘visual excess’ on show creates a dialectic between seeing and not-seeing which can be characterised as ‘glimpsing’ designed futurity. There is an eroticism of SF world-building here – cult is nothing if not about passionate text/audience encounters – metaphorically akin to Roland Barthes’ infamous description in The Pleasure of the Text:
it is intermittence … which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. (1975: 9–10)
By almost overloading the frame with detail which the camera must move past or obscure, Blade Runner’s mise-en-scène becomes one of intermittence, as Scott Bukatman has written of Douglas Trumbull’s SFX work on the cityscape:
In Trumbull’s extensive, overwhelming tours of futurity … the technological environment extends to and beyond the limits of the frame … A tension is generated between a totalising technological environment that can be taken in by a single, magisterial, omnipotent glance (as at a painting) and the trajectory of movement that explores, expands and temporalises that space. (2003: 124; see also 1999: 251)
Blade Runner’s visuals are excessive not just because they are so detailed, but because they cannot be taken in after one viewing (or even multiple viewings), spilling beyond the limits of the frame. Bukatman has described Blade Runner’s geography as ‘fractal’ (see 1997: 58–9), a metaphor implying that further levels of detail can be discovered at higher levels of resolution, in an infinite extension of seeing. Just as we glimpse city panoramas, so too do we glimpse street-level life, all the way through to a single eye filling the screen in extreme close-up. But a truly ‘fractal’ diegesis would surrender its secrets to the attentive viewer, able to zoom in on the smallest detail, just like Deckard using the ‘esper’ viewing technology in Blade Runner itself. By contrast, I would argue that Blade Runner is consistently structured, and not just in Trumbull’s FX work, by the very tension between an ‘omnipotent glance’ (taking it all in) and a glancing ‘trajectory’ (moving past the intermittent design detail, and its appearance-as-disappearance). Its cult appeal resides, to an extent, in the fact that its seemingly ‘completely furnished world’ (Eco 1995: 198) is only actually ‘completed’ in fan audiences’ imaginations, or as a result of supplementing the text. Of course, it could be argued that all production design, whether for cult movies or not, involves an excess going beyond narrative and framing: ‘the defining feature of design is its suggestive plurality … inevitably multidimensional and never monolithic in its significance’ (Britton & Barker 2003: 16). This may well be so, but I would argue that Blade Runner’s cultish design nevertheless presents an excess of SF world-building detail qualitatively beyond any general concept of ‘suggestive plurality’. Piers D. Britton notes this qualitative design difference in Blade Runner when he observes that its ‘attention to physical detail … [and] sensual foregrounding of manufactured artifacts’ are linked to ‘a tacit injunction to look’ (2009: 346; emphasis in original). More than just a design logic or plurality, hyperdetailed diegesis is, crucially, a design game; challenging viewers to see more, to spot information. Ridley Scott has deployed this gaming discourse, but in relation to representation rather than industrial design:
The emphasis I placed on characters’ eyes in Blade Runner was just my playing games with the audience. Obviously if every replicant in the film had glowing eyes, then there would have been no need for the Voight-Kampff machine to detect them. We went through a little tap-dance argument as to whether I should present something different about their eyes. I decided to take a middle line on this, to be deliberately intriguing. (In Peary 2005: 49)
However, this directorial intrigue again amounts to an emphasis on seeing and not-seeing; sometimes audiences can spot replicants’ glowing eyes, and at other times this sign is absent or obscure. Audiences are challenged to complete a picture, to see more, to cognitively and passionately strive for textual consistency. Although it can be argued that the ‘main image system of the movie is eyes and eye imagery’ (Schelde 1993: 233; Tomas 2004: 34), this does not seem to indicate that Blade Runner monovalently operates as a ‘drama about vision’ where the genre of SF ‘privileges an aesthetics of presence: it shows us stuff’ (Bukatman 1997: 10; emphasis in original). Rather, Blade Runner’s design-cult incitement to audience activity lies in showing and not-showing, staging appearance-as-disappearance.
Seeking to get a handle on Blade Runner, critics have responded by selecting out design details, privileging them as emblematic or especially metonymic. Staiger remarks on how ‘fluorescent tubing is pervasive, even serving as an umbrella handle’ (1999: 118), while Vivian Sobchack observes that it ‘is not surprising that industrial pipes … figure prominently in the mise-en-scène’ (1999:136). The former is read as indicating a sense of enclosed space, even on the street, while the latter indicates how audience attention arguably ‘tends to stay grounded – fascinated by the city’s … transformation of its ruins’ (ibid.). And Aaron Barlow observes that the use of neon ‘provides a connection between the world of the film and the world of 1982. Many of the products the neon promotes were real to the time of the movie’s release (… Atari and Pan-Am…)’ (2005b: 54), illustrating the film’s visual collision of extra-diegetic 1982 and diegetic 2019. Indeed, the placement of a ‘TDK’ neon sign directly behind Roy Batty during his death scene strikes me as particularly curious, bringing to mind a real-life manufacturer of recording/storage technologies – analogue in the 1980s, digital today – just as the replicant is traumatically switched off. This design contiguity of real-life and diegetic consumer technology may point up how much more than a mere recording Batty is, also demonstrating how Blade Runner ‘stimulates and exhausts the eyes, for there is always – literally – more to see’ (Sobchack 1999: 136). By choosing iconic instances of design (umbrellas; industrial ducts; neon signage), these critics seek to reduce Blade Runner to manageable, mappable dimensions, occupying positions of cognitive mastery in relation to the text.
Blade Runner’s own publicity has also selected out iconic aspects of its production design. Drew Struzan’s art for the Final Cut (2003, used 2007) incorporates the aesthetic Blade Runner has become famed for, emphasising rain and neon signs in its composition, as well as including an airborne Spinner. Like Struzan’s Final Cut image, John Alvin’s 1982 poster art also prominently featured one of Syd Mead’s Spinners, this time swooping down over the police headquarters’ building; a studded, near-cylindrical, geometric structure dotted with pinpricks of light. This original ‘narrative image’ (see Ellis 1982), aiming to sell an idea of the movie to audiences, therefore stressed diegetic architecture almost as much as the star Harrison Ford, placed top-centre in the image, and the femme fatale iconography of Sean Young, positioned below and to one side of Ford. Standing in for the SF spectacle of Blade Runner, this one building (rather than a skyline or less clearly distinguishable profusion) was granted a visual pre-eminence in Alvin’s artwork. Its depiction corresponds to a heightened moment near the film’s beginning where as ‘Deckard flies in a spinner to the police headquarters … the diegetic sound suddenly disappears, and the trip gains an almost sacred feel to it … accompanied by pealing “organ” chords’ (Larsen 2007: 179).
John Alvin’s 1982 poster: Blade Runner’s initial promotional ‘narrative image’ emphasised science-fictional vistas such as this one
This is evidently a self-conscious moment of SFX spectacle, and is textually demarcated and musically reinforced as such, making sense of its presence in the promotional poster image. The result, though, is to further emphasise Blade Runner’s designed world – the police precinct’s distinctive shape coming to function almost as part of the Blade Runner brand identity or logo. Along with the Tyrell headquarters, a modified pyramidal creation, which appeared on photographic posters (see Lacey 2000: 7) Blade Runner’s created buildings function exactly like real-world ‘iconic icons’ in Charles Jencks’s architectural definition:
In effect, this type of building is doubly iconic. Firstly it is a bizarre reduced image – like a logo. Secondly, like an iconic sign, there is a similitude between visual images. One uncanny shape calls up surprising metaphors. There is no question that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, designed in 1943 but only finished after his death in 1959, is the first example of the iconic icon. (2005: 28)
Jencks argues that an international vogue for ‘statement’ buildings like Norman Foster’s Swiss Re Tower in London (‘the gherkin’) has led to a mode of architecture in which ‘a successful iconic building will always elicit a flurry of bizarre comparisons … The icon won’t calm down …This is the age of the enigmatic signifier’ (2005: 33). Iconic buildings are designed to stand out, and to function as logos of themselves, offering immediately recognisable outlines even when reproduced as small images. As ‘enigmatic signifiers’ they attract commentary by resembling multiple forms, for example, Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim resembling discs, stacked plates and ramps (2005: 29). Blade Runner’s diegetic buildings also work in this way; the police precinct can be compared to a giant asterisk due to the eight wedges radiating out across its upper surface, as well as a strip light or a cylinder, while the Mayan-influenced Tyrell pyramid with its surrounding buttresses (see Shay 2000: 12 and 15; Alessio 2005: 67 on this structure) has also been likened to a microchip (see Sobchack in Rushing & Frentz 1995: 147; Bukatman 1997: 58).
Blade Runner’s designed world and real-world design are not merely linked by coincidence; in his study of professional design, Harvey Molotch argues that contemporary architecture and design constitute
an entertainment-industrial agglomeration, with LA interactions going in multiple directions. Architects do movie projects and movie designers become architects. Product designer Syd Mead (once with the Ford styling department) created … futuristic elements of the film Blade Runner. Blade Runner’s brooding futuristic imagery then affected all kinds of goods, including cars; today’s boom boxes probably owe their look more to that film than any other single source. (2005: 182; see also Massey 2000)
The film may have influenced real design practices, but its diegesis also incorporates ‘high-end design’ linked to ‘conscious designer intervention and authorship’ (Julier 2000: 69) such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown House textile block, as well as Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Argyle chair. Design discourses hence mark the text, in the sense that it combines
multiple time frames and modes of image-making … director Ridley Scott and production designers Lawrence Paull and Syd Mead explicitly visualise the successive layers of urban history by juxtaposing images drawn from William Hogarth, Edward Hopper, Frank Lloyd Wright, Moebius and Michael Graves. (Collins 1989: 133)
Textually appropriating Lloyd Wright’s work produces a situation where the outside walls of the Ennis-Brown house ‘inspired Syd Mead’s production design for the studio-built interior [of Deckard’s home]; here the [real-world] exterior is familiar and the inside, open for guided tours, shares only its Mayan tile-design with Deckard’s apartment’ (Brooker 2005b: 16). Steve Carper argues that this motif is ‘ironically liberated from a Frank Lloyd Wright house easily as monumental as the far vaster bulk of Tyrell’s Mayan pyramid’ (1997: 186), suggesting that the film’s architectural design pales in comparison with Lloyd Wright’s real-world achievements. Whether or not this is the case, Carper’s argument testifies to the way that design discourse fluctuates between extra-diegetic and diegetic levels of meaning, aligning the text with notions of (high) culture at the same time as it draws from popular SF, horror and noir genres. Working in the same vein as Blade Runner’s existential philosophising, the film’s design intertexts position it liminally between ‘popular’ and ‘high’ culture. Without tipping over securely or non-contentiously into full-blown ‘arthouse’ status, Blade Runner becomes a kind of ‘anomalous object’ (Julier 2000: 10), violating cultural categories of ‘popular genre’ versus ‘art’ and becoming cultish through this textual transgression. As a cultic anomaly, it is perhaps an ‘arthouse’ movie for some fans and critics; genre SF for others; or an SF/art hybrid for yet others. Blade Runner’s very different genre/art-and-design contextualisations open up and reflexively engage with questions of cultural value, articulating cult discourse with this interrogative process.
Piggybacking on the cultural authorisation of the likes of Lloyd Wright, Blade Runner further represents the multiple auteurist ‘visions’ of Ridley Scott, Syd Mead, Lawrence Paull, Tom Cranham, Douglas Trumbull et al. as filmic continuations of real-world product design and architectural construction. Authorship is enacted via citation; contra Hoberman and Rosenbaum (1991), I would say that Blade Runner certainly is an auteur movie. However, its auteurism persists more strongly through visual design discourses (hyperdetailed mise-en-scène) rather than through written genre discourses (narrative patterns and ‘intertextual frames’). Any auteurist sense of Blade Runner as ‘written’ is decentred and destabilised not only because of its uncertain status as an ‘adaptation’ but also because drafts of the screenplay written by Hampton Fancher were extensively revised by David Peoples at Ridley Scott’s behest. This results in a situation where even the individuals concerned are unclear as to who may have been responsible for elements of Blade Runner’s celebrated dialogue. For example, far from cueing an authorial, screenwriter-led interpretation of Blade Runner, the UCE DVD commentary featuring Fancher (HF) and Peoples (DP) includes these gloriously Beckettian ramblings:
DP: This opening scene [Leon being interrogated by Holden] is all you, it’s fantastic, it never was touched –
HF: Yeah, it was touched, it was touched.
DP: Who touched it?
HF: You did.
DP: I did not.
HF: Yeah, you did…
DP: What did I do? … I didn’t think I changed anything in this…
HF: In fact, I wish I could say the opposite, that it was me, but it was you…
DP: Oh, I hope I didn’t [write the line ‘I’ll tell you about my mother’] … I’ve enjoyed disliking myself that I didn’t for so long now.
HF: No, no, I didn’t write that, you did.
DP: No, you did. (Commentary 2, Disc 1 of the UCE; 005:55–007:17)
Rather than presenting what Barbara Klinger terms ‘“promotable” facts’ (2006: 73) and thus reinforcing a kind of PR or ‘official’ version of behind-the-scenes information, this beautiful exchange offers up two writers, each pointedly claiming that the other is responsible for a notable textual detail, thus mutually destabilising discourses of authorship at the level of the screenplay. In contrast to these unusually non-authoritative (but compelling) performances of writerly auteurism, Ridley Scott’s directorial and visual auteurism is strongly reinforced by the UCE (see chapter 4).
Blade Runner’s fan community responds to specific, cultifying textual attributes of the phenomenon in a number of ways. Rather than arguing that cult status is produced through audience activity, here I am suggesting that fan practices themselves significantly relate to, and are incited by, textual features such as architectural/design discourse and the Barthesian ‘intermittence’ of glimpsed detail. One practice, examined by Will Brooker, involves fan pilgrimage to real-world locations like the Ennis-Brown house:
‘Deckard’s apartment’, after the pilgrimage, will call to mind a composite between the sun-baked Ennis-Brown house up on the hill and the intriguingly similar, but frustratingly different, shots in Blade Runner of the building’s rain-soaked exterior, enhanced and disguised by matte painting … The concept of ‘Deckard’s apartment’ after the pilgrimage becomes a stereoscopic vision of two partially-compatible versions that can, with a squint and a shift, be made to blur into a central overlap. (2005b: 16)
Brooker argues that such fan pilgrimage, even where it is a personalised, individualised activity, recalls preceding tours made by other fans:
texts that link the visitor’s immediate experience of LA’s everyday, contemporary locations with … remembered onscreen sequences are the testimonies of previous pilgrims … my first thoughts were along the lines of … ‘what I’m looking at now is just like the picture on BladeZone’s website’. (Brooker 2005b: 26)
Even though Blade Runner fans may find themselves surrounded by ‘fans of … Frank Lloyd Wright’ rather than fellow cultists (Ben Mund in Brooker 2005b: 24), they are still able to virtually commune with cult fandom. Fan interpretations, open-ended speculations and evaluations of canon have all been studied along with this exploration of pilgrimage (see Brooker 1999; Christy Gray 2005; Jonathan Gray 2005), but there has been a surprising absence in academic work on Blade Runner fandom: the subcommunity that creates replica props as well as collating design objects which feature in the mise-en-scène, or which emulate the ‘Blade Runner aesthetic’. These fans, for example, the online community at http://www.propsummit.com, celebrate, catalogue and collect ‘the art of Blade Runner’. Their activities provide evidence for Sara Gwenllian Jones’ argument that although
Umberto Eco identifies the provision of ‘a completely furnished world’ … as a defining characteristic of cult texts … the existence and practices of fan cultures suggests that the opposite is true; films … achieve cult status not because they present ‘completely furnished worlds’ but rather because the fracture and excess of their fantastic imaginaries draw the audience’s attention to the fact that their diegetic worlds are invariably incompletely furnished. (2000: 12–3; emphasis in original)
Fans themselves ‘complete’ the ‘furnished world’ of Blade Runner via their textual supplementations. They respond to the text’s ‘intermittence’ of glimpsed props by using screen grabs – highlighted, enlarged digital images – to replicate or collect onscreen material. One fan project involved researching and making a replica of Deckard’s futuristic Johnnie Walker bottle, producing it as a short-run which fellow fans could put their name down for. Complete with replica labels and instructions for modifying a commercially-available bottle cap, this small-scale industrial production amounted to a type of ‘DIY merchandise’, countering the relative lack of official Blade Runner merchandising and catering to the subcommunity’s interest in Ridley Scott’s designed world (‘Blade Runner Whiskey Bottle Project … BOTTLE REALIZED!!!’, http://www.propsummit.com/viewtopic.php?t=344&start=1040, accessed 20/1/09). Rumoured to be a found object, fans have nonetheless not tracked down a commercial source for the unusual squared-off bottle design, hence the community’s interest in drawing on collective expertise in graphic design, information-gathering, sculpting and so on.
The 2019 Johnnie Walker bottle in Bryant’s office: fan-made prop replicas are based on carefully scrutinising glimpsed details within the mise-en-scène
As well as creating their own material versions of props, these fans are also interested in screen-used props, for example, Bryant’s desk (see Willoughby n.d.) sourced from Blade Runner’s Art Director, David Snyder. As Josh Stenger notes, ‘when props are made available for private purchase … the items’ value becomes at once increasingly unstable and highly expansive’ (2006 :32), making screen-used artifacts too costly for all but a very few fans. More affordable, however, are found objects used in the making of the film, as these can be entirely screen-accurate without being screen-used. An example of this mode of collecting is Joan Fuste’s ‘My Blade Runner’ site which lists details of Braun consumer products visible in Deckard’s apartment, highlighting them in digital images, for example, the Multipress MP50 juice extractor, ‘seen … briefly, just when Rachael … knows her replicant nature. Designed by Jürgen Greubel in 1970. Available at ebay for a price’ (Fuste 2008). Whether researching and creating replicas, collecting screen-used one-offs or screen-accurate found objects, the propsummit fan community is dedicated to completing Blade Runner’s ‘furnished world’, and converting prop details from briefly-glimpsed images into material realities. Incited by the text’s Barthesian ‘intermittence’, these fans centrally reproduce the text’s discourses of design.
In this chapter, I have argued that Blade Runner’s cult status is textually incited and supported by the monumental intertextuality of the film(s), allowing audiences to select out generic strands of meaning, or favoured moments, and hence respond very differently to the Blade Runner phenomenon. Blade Runner can be considered as a first-wave postmodern cult, having been made at a moment in film history where ‘unconscious’ intertextuality was giving way to knowing ‘metacult’, yet also deconstructing those categories (see Eco 1995).
Contra Staiger, the textual qualities which help to make Blade Runner a cult movie also result in it being read differently by fans as a matter of course. The divergence and open-endedness of fan interpretations mean that, unlike many other fan cultures, there is a less observable interpretative community around the text: Blade Runner ‘attracts a project based not so much around community but solitary dedication, and is as such something quite unique among the Internet fan groups described in academic study to date’ (Brooker 1999: 69). Discourses present in the text require an ‘interdiscourse’ (Fiske 1990: 85) between text and audience to become relevant or compelling for specific audience members; such interdiscourses can involve genre as well as philosophies of self, architecture, art and design. This means that viewers may embrace the Blade Runner cult where such an ‘interdiscourse’ relates to aspects of their lived identity, or remain wholly indifferent where no such ‘interdiscourse’ is present.
In short, analysing cult texts and their qualities need not be disqualified by what I have termed the ‘variant response thesis’. Indeed, specific cult fan practices like building replica props can be explicated with reference to Blade Runner’s textual properties of ‘intermittence’ and hyperdetail, whilst fan pilgrimages also make sense in relation to textual discourses of design. Viewing audience activity as the logical generator of cult status fails to explore the specificity of audience/text engagements, and how fan discourses resonate with those structured into cultifying textual properties. In the next chapter, I will switch my primary focus from cult texts to cult receptions. As my approach to fandom and production here has demonstrated, we cannot address texts without receptions (and vice versa), somehow seeking to install a logical purism of text-based or audience-based cult. Whereas this chapter has sought to define what makes Blade Runner a text-led cult, chapter 3 considers how the binary of ‘authentic’ versus ‘inauthentic’ cult has circulated in academic, fan and journalistic receptions.